Toronto’s mayor doesn’t have a leg to stand on as he attempted to get a leg-over on the defamation suit brought by Star reporter Daniel Dale.

Of course, Toronto’s sorry excuse for a mayor doesn’t have a leg to stand on as he attempted Tuesday — clumsily, oozing insincerity, spraying qualifiers left and right — to get a leg-over on the defamation suit brought by Star reporter Daniel Dale. Just days earlier, all bluster and defiance, he’d declared: “I stand by every word I said.”

But as we’ve surely learned by now, whenever RoFo says just about anything, best wait a bit and he’ll say the opposite later: I never smoked crack cocaine/yes I have smoked crack cocaine; I never got charged with DUI in Florida/I got charged with DUI in Florida; I wasn’t at that Leaf game/I was at that Leaf game; I have nothing left to hide . . . oops.

The lying loop is endless, concentric circles of prevarication.

A mayor who has declined to sue for libel over the multitude of scandalizing stories written about him — that would expose Ford to a discovery process he clearly is unwilling to enjoin — was served with papers last Friday over the hugely damaging and humongously slanderous remarks he made about Daniel in that bromance interview-not-interview with Conrad Black on Vision TV, two guys sittin’ around chewing their mutual fat.

Made and repeated.

RoFo insinuated Daniel was a pedophile, resurrecting the thoroughly discredited — via police investigation — allegations he tossed around 19 months ago about the Star’s city hall correspondent lurking around his house, standing on a cement block taking pictures over the backyard fence, a menace to his kids, ad hominumhominumhominum. Except, no photos on Daniel’s cell phone — dropped, picked up by Ford — and no cinder blocks to stand on and no bushes for the purpose of lurking behind and no wee Fords in the yard and, nope, Ford never “caught” the reporter doing squat nefariously.

Thus, staring down the barrel of litigation, Tuesday’s limp effort at legal damage control, as transparent a duck-and-cover as Ford has mounted before, starting with the Star’s crack-expose in May and proceeding through everything that’s surfaced since — the public intoxication, the purported association with gang-bangers, the scheme (as captured on police wiretaps, not proven in court) pursued by pal and button-man Sandro Lisi to retrieve the mayor’s missing phone, which resulted in extortion charges against Lisi, the potential blackmail discussed by sordid characters on those intercepts as they referenced other arm-twisting evidence that may have been in their possession.

I wish there was a fresh way to write all this. But the nut graphs have become as banal as Ford’s own tired pronouncements. He has worn me out.

So here we go again, once more around the disclaimer maypole. Rarely, however, has RoFo’s conspicuous, odouriferous circumvention of facts been as obvious as the bundle of equivocating argy-bargy that emerged from his pie-hole Tuesday, in the protected venue of council chambers.

“I did not mean to insinuate anything about Mr. Dale personally in my interview with Mr. Black. I certainly did not intend to suggest that he is a pedophile.” Adding: “I do not believe Mr. Dale is a pedophile.”

To review what Ford indeed did say in that journalistically mortifying “chat” with Lord-a-Leaping Black: “When a guy is taking pictures of little kids . . . I don’t want to say that word, but you start thinking, you know, what’s this guy all about?”

What’s it all about, RoFie?

See, it was just the dastardly media up to their old implicating tricks, ascribing to Ford the word he did not say, in a vacuum, like. Ford didn’t retract so much as he reinvented, never delivered the unambiguous apology Dale had sought — which is why the lawsuit hasn’t been dropped — and shifted blame to 1) the media, and 2) a neighbour’s account of what had happened.

Any patsy will do.

Ford apologized for “the way in which the media has interpreted my statements.”

“My comments to Conrad Black were in context of my worst experiences with the incredible assault by media and particularly the Toronto Star on me and my family,” he went on.

“My comments related to the fear I had for my family when my long-time neighbour told me that someone was lurking at my fence and appeared to be taking pictures of my family home over the fence.

“To be clear, I never personally saw Mr. Dale peering over the fence or taking pictures. My neighbour told me, however, that he did see someone doing this. Mr. Dale apparently denies that.”

Mr. Dale apparently denies that?

And Ford is an impaired-apparent.

It was a phony apologia day all ’round for the mayor. For suggesting on Monday that only corrupt colleagues were allowed to stay in council chambers — this after Speaker Frances Nunziata, hardly one of Ford’s perceived enemies, had demanded a forelock-tugging retraction of the comment — the mayor screwed up all the sneering sarcasm in his bottomless well of bile. Nunziata was unsatisfied with Ford’s initial stab at it. “You need to say ‘I apologize,’” she scolded.

“How about I am so sorry?” frat-boy Ford countered. “Is that as good as I apologize or so sorry? Which one do you want Madam Speaker? Like super, super, super, super, super, super sorry?”